New Year’s Resomolutions

Happy New Year! I’m back! Things got a little nuts there around the holidays, and I had to let this blog fall by the wayside for a bit. What can I say? It was my first year regularly blogging and I didn’t have any idea that the merriment (and also the fracas at my day job) would have such an impact.

For this, I apologize.

However! I am back, and determined to return to regularly scheduled programming. I am also quietly amazed that Feral Wordmonger is now fully one year old. It doesn’t seem like it started off that long ago.

So far as I can tell, it’s basically traditional to discuss new year’s resolutions ‘round about the start of January, if for no other reason than it’s seasonally appropriate. But I’ve really only got one resolution for this year:

Do something writing-related every day.

I’m tracking this resolution by marking off each day I fulfill this goal on my brand new 2016 Taylor Swift calendar. You might think I’m joking about having purchased a Taylor Swift calendar. Those of you who have been around her for a while know that I’m not.

Or am I.

In some ways, I’m being pretty lenient about what is considered “writing related.” All I gotta do is one or two sentences—whether it’s an outline, a story, a novel, doesn’t matter. Or I can edit something I’ve already written. Or type something that I wrote longhand (during which I typically edit, anyway). Or I can help edit something one of my friends has written, or submit something for publication. Or, if the best thing on that day for my writing is to recharge the creative batteries by getting extra sleep or watching a movie or reading a book or spending time with the fam, that’s cool, too.

I’m hoping to have “rest days” be few and far between, though. I’ve heard enough times from enough people that inspiration isn’t exactly reliable. There are times when you just gotta put pen to paper or fingers to keys and hope it all works out.

Interestingly, I don’t think reading, of itself, will count towards a check mark for a day. I read plenty of my own accord—mostly in audiobook format, so it’s more listening, but at that point we’re getting into semantics. I am consuming bookstuff every day, sure, but I feel that reading books is to writing like breathing is to living: if you’re not doing the first regularly, you’re going to kinda suck at the second.

The whole idea stemmed from an episode of Game Grumps (as many things in my life do). Specifically, it comes from episode 94 of their Pokemon FireRed playthrough, where they talk about an idea that Danny called “not breaking the chain.” It’s a simple concept, and it just means doing something each day, maintaining a chain of days where you have worked toward your goal. And you do your absolute damndest to not break that chain.

So that’s my resolution for 2016: to do something writing-related every day and not break the chain.